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The development of critical pathways along with continuous quality improvement and patient-focused care represents one of the key initiatives in health care in the 1990s. The critical pathway defines the components of care, including treatments, diagnostic measures, and activities to be performed each day, to achieve the desired outcome for a patie...

The safe handling of cytotoxic agents is intimately related to the technical aspects of drug preparation, dispensing, and administration. The appropriate equipment, supplies, protective clothing, and waste disposal systems must be available to the health care worker who is called upon to prepare cytotoxic agents. In addition, the health care worker...

Total quality management techniques were used to lay the groundwork for and to implement procedural changes designed to improve compliance with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' medication use indicator for ordering and administering presurgical antibiotics. The effect of these procedural changes on patient outcomes...

Economic and competitive pressures in the health care market are causing hospitals and other health care providers to seek more effective ways to improve the quality of care and to decrease costs. Integrating total quality management and continuous quality improvement techniques into traditional drug use evaluation methodology allows for the develo...

Physician partnering, value-added relationships, and integrated delivery systems with risk/incentive arrangements are emerging in managed care. These arrangements require time-sensitive program information that can be used in continuous quality improvement programs. Components of any clinical intervention program designed to improve the quality of ...

Critical pathways are multidisciplinary tools designed to improve patient care and efficiency. Almost every path requires some type of pharmacotherapeutic intervention, from selection of surgical prophylaxis to management of anticoagulation. Pharmacists should become involved with the critical pathway process because it offers an excellent opportun...

The design of institutional medication use programs that are effective and meet regulatory and accreditation standards is becoming increasingly dependent upon a thorough understanding of the principles and applications of continuous quality improvement (CQI) and total quality management (TQM). Both the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcar...

Providing complete and understandable information to patients about medicines is considered an integral component of high-quality medical and pharmaceutical care. With such information, not only can the level of general health increase, but costs associated with noncompliance, including polypharmacy and hospitalization, can decrease. Although patie...

A commitment was made at a 1,025-bed county teaching facility to increase staff pharmacists' involvement in nutritional support and physician prescribing. The plan was to utilize the Nutritional Support Clinical Pharmacy Specialist (NSCPS) to train the staff pharmacists to provide direct patient care for patients receiving parenteral nutrition. The...